Thinking in Other Languages

Hello,

It’s been a while since I sent out a newsletter, so hello again from Tainan, Taiwan — and a particular hello to new subscribers! Thanks for signing up. After a bit of a pause, I’m back in action, and now I’ll be sending out newsletters every quarter, with a mix of updates, news, and links to interesting things.

In this edition, I’m sharing news about a fun new book project I’m working on. There’s also a miscellany of intriguing stuff from minority languages to the virtues of sentimentality, and from spoonbills to pole-dancing gorillas

Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese and Gaelic

The biggest news this time is that I’ve been working on editing a collection of stories in Taiwanese (Tâigi / 台語, Taiwan’s own variant of Hokkien) and Gaelic. This has been an incredibly rewarding project, supported by a small grant from the Scottish government’s Scottish Connections Fund.

The collection will be published by Wind&Bones Books in June 2025. The stories blend together folklore, myth, dream, religion, politics and the everyday, in both Taiwan and Scotland. Our writers — Lisa MacDonald and Elissa Hunter-Dorans in Scotland and Kiú-kiong and Naomi Sím in Taiwan — are just wonderful. And all four stories will be published in four languages — Taiwanese, Mandarin, English and Gaelic.

If you pre-order the book before May 1st (we’ll be shipping across the world), you will have our endless gratitude, and we’ll also list your name as a supporter in the published paperback.

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In Other News

Talking Taiwanese

Since arriving in Taiwan, I’ve been working on my Taiwanese. As a Mandarin speaker, listening to Tâi-gí is, more or less, equivalent to the experience of an English speaker listening to Danish. You have the feeling that this language is somehow familiar, and that you should be able to understand it. You even can understand bits and pieces. But it is definitely not the same language. I’m currently at the stage where I can chat a bit with old folks in the park, and sing along (out of tune) to Taiwanese songs, and as a language, it’s lots of fun.

If you are interested in the fascinating historical background to this language — its suppression and revival — you can read the piece I wrote about Tâi-gí for The Dial over in the US. For this piece, I spoke to people involved in working to reinvigorate the language, and to pass it down to the next generation.

Should We Preserve Endangered Languages?

While on the subject of languages under threat, this piece by Rebecca Roache, who is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, is worth reading. It is about language death, and why sentimentality is potentially a virtue. So this should be of interest to fans of both language and philosophy.

Wayward things…

And now for a quick round-up of other wayward things…

• I’ve been on a Writing Residency in Taipei with my partner and Wind&Bones collaborator Hannah Stevens. The residency was in a beautiful old Japanese house. It was January, so the house was very cold. Nevertheless, we survived well enough to get started working together on a fun collaborative novel project. The book involves black-faced spoonbills. And murder. More news soon…

• Speaking of spoonbills, they’re really great birds. There’s a spoonbill reserve in Qigu (七股) just north of Tainan, and I took a bike out there the weekend before last to visit the birds. One bird, particularly smitten with Taiwan, has apparently come back every year for nine years.

• There’s also a nearby temple that has a gate adorned with spoonbills instead of the more usual dragons. Apologies for the rather murky photo: it was an overcast day.

  

  Spoonbill and fish on a temple arch, Qigu, Taiwan.

• We’ve just gone into the second year of our public philosophy salon in collaboration with the Wansha Performing Arts Centre in Tainan. It’s free, it’s fun, and everyone is welcome. There’s more information here.

• Also with our friends at Wansha, we have a new, free creative writing café for writers in both Mandarin and English (or, for that matter, Spanish, Tâi-gí, Uzbek or Scots). Our next session on March 13th is already fully-booked, and so we’re planning lots more of this.

• And finally, I can’t resist sharing this image of an… er… pole-dancing gorilla that I stumbled across in the Orthodox Luermen Temple (正統鹿耳門聖母廟), while I was out and about looking for spoonbills. Now, that’s what I call orthodox…

  

  Person in a gorilla suit, pole-dancing in a temple, Tainan.

That’s all for the time being! I’ve made a note in my calendar to send out another newsletter in June. Until then, if you want to say hello, just hit “reply”, or email me on [email protected].

All the best,

Will Buckingham